Kaypro System disks?

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- On Thu, 7/2/09, Tom Manos <tmanos at concursive.com> wrote:
> Will a Kaypro really play nice with a
> 3.5" floppy drive? It never occurred to me to try it. I
> thought the floppy drivers under CP/M only knew about DD
> drives, and the bios on the boot disk was different between
> the various Kaypro models among other things to support the
> different floppies they had (SS/SD, SS/DD, DS/DD).

A couple of tricks. For one, you won't be able to use high density drives - the controller can't handle the higher data rate without some hacking. But a 720k floppy drive is almost the same as a DS/DD 5 1/4" floppy drive. It just has 80 tracks instead of 40. So, if you use it without any special drivers, it will work, and the system won't know the difference - it will only use the first 40 tracks, and you'll get 360k of storage. I don't know about the Kaypro, but on the TRS-80, it's possible, with OS support, to use 720k f3 1/2" drives on unmodified hardware, and use the full capacity.

-Ian